


Quiet

by FidgetyWriter



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-19
Updated: 2013-08-19
Packaged: 2017-12-24 01:19:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/933433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FidgetyWriter/pseuds/FidgetyWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taking revenge on Howe turns out not to be the complete closure Cecily had hoped it would be. Luckily, her fellow Grey Warden is there for moral support.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quiet

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt: "Quiet Me": A drabble about one character trying to calm the other down
> 
> The rape warning is for a brief mention of it during Howe's assault on Castle Cousland--not between Alistair and the Warden because wow absolutely not.

The moment was exactly as Cecily had imagined it for the past ten months. Arl Rendon Howe was sprawled across the cobblestone floor of his basement, his left hand bleeding freely from where a nicely aimed shot from Leliana had dislodged the sword it had been holding only moments before. The traitorous bastard instinctively put up a hand to shield his face as Cecily advanced on him. 

Her fingers were beginning to go numb from how tightly she gripped the Cousland family sword she’d taken from her family’s vault the night of their murders. She had brought it along just for this occasion. 

The hatred she had swallowed for almost a year came bubbling to the surface. She found she could hardly speak: there were no words strong enough to convey her utter contempt for this man…this man who slaughtered old tutors and nannies and five year old nephews for his own political gains.

She dropped to her knees beside Howe and swung one over his chest so she knelt directly above him. He squirmed in terror between her legs as she put the sword with the ornately etched “C” to his throat.

“How should I do it, you foul animal?” she spat at him. “Should I bring this blade across your throat like your men did to my brother’s wife? Or perhaps you’d prefer a few jabs in the belly like the ones that killed my father?”

Despite his hopeless situation, Howe’s lips turned up in a sneer.

“There’s that Cousland determination,” he said. “The determination that robbed me of my rightful place at—“

“Shut up!”

Cecily bent down and pressed her elbow to his throat, effectively cutting off his supply of oxygen and, thus, his ability to speak.

“You thought you’d be doing a clean job of it, didn’t you?” she asked. “You were so sure of it that you’d promised your men a bit of fun.”

Howe struggled to pry her elbow off of his throat. She let off the pressure a bit in order to enable him to breath.

“You know what one of your men said to me? Do you know, Howe?”

It was the one occurrence during that horrible night in Highever that she had not disclosed to anyone, not even Alistair. Her Mabari hound had woken her in the early morning hours with angry growling and barking. When the poor elf servant had burst into her room, trying to warn her, only to be shot down, and she stood, screaming, in her doorway wearing only a nightgown one of Howe’s men turned toward the sound of her cries. His mouth had turned up in a wicked grin, and he’d said ten words to her before her mother’s arrow landed in his neck.

_“I’m gonna fuck you like the Cousland pig you are.”_

Cecily heard Leliana gasp behind her as she repeated the words Howe’s thug had spoken to her last summer.

“You are nothing, Howe,” she pressed on. “And I will make sure your family has nothing once this is all over.”

She brought the blade up through the soft spot just underneath his right ear and into his skull. The wound took only seconds to kill him, and she watched the life leave his eyes.

But it was not enough. He had robbed her of everything. If Duncan had not been in Highever that night she would be lying in an unmarked grave with the rest of her house.

She withdrew the blade from his neck and brought it down onto his face, neatly slicing his nose in half. Then she pulled it out and struck the same spot again.

One…two…three…four…

She counted the stabs to his wretched face, barely aware of the screams of anguish issuing from her own mouth. She would hack his whole face off…cut him up into pieces and burn those pieces at Loghain’s feet.

“Cecily.”

A hand grabbed firmly at her wrist and held it away from Howe’s body. She let the blade drop and crumpled inward. She did not want to feel any more. 

Alistair’s drakeskin gloved hands gingerly pulled her off of Howe. He sat on the cobblestone floor beside her, and she slid easily into his lap, wrapping herself around him in an attempt to disappear.

“It’s over,” he told her. “It’s done. He can’t hurt anyone ever again.”

It was little consolation to her mother and her father and Nan and little Oren. But he was right. She had done what she had sworn to do ten months ago. The pain would not lessen anytime soon (she suspected it would never leave her completely), but her family was avenged.

They had the Landsmeet to worry about. And the spreading Blight. And she still held out hope that Fergus was alive somewhere.

Her legs felt like lead. She became aware that during the fight she had scuffed her elbow and it stung.

“I don’t want to move,” she confessed.

“Would you prefer I carried you out of here?” he joked.

“Well, if you’re offering…”

He laughed, and the sound of it cheered her up a bit.

“It starts with innocently with you, and then suddenly I’m Ferelden’s packmule.”

“No,” she said. “Just mine.”


End file.
